In August of 2002 Lee Harris wrote an essay, Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology, that was the most astonishing thing I had read about 9/11 (and I've been unable to shut up about it since then). It wasn't that he had any new facts to add, or any revealing new summation of data that I, or the writers I had been reading up to then, had missed. He simply had seen something, hiding in plain sight, which no one else had noticed. Since then, I've read everything he's written (that I know about), and to my mind, there isn't an idea man out there that has a clearer picture of the threat our civilization faces from the Islamists who would tear it down.
He has just published a book, Civilization and its Enemies: The Next Stage of History, that lays bare both the threat we face and the steps we must take to make sure that civilization itself survives.
I pre-ordered the book the moment Amazon put it up, and have spent the last few days reading it, and it's a wonderful fleshing-out of the ideas he's put forth in essays such as Fantasy Ideology, Our World-Historical Gamble, Sheep Amidst Wolves : On The Fine Art of Being Stupid , The Intellectual Origins of America Bashing, as well as the Tech-central station column he's been writing for a while now.
I can't recommend this book enough. If you've read any of his stuff before I don't think you'll need my recommendation, but if you haven't, read the Fantasy Ideology article (which approximates the book's first chapter) then go buy the book.
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